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Tories on Senate scandal: from denial to obstruction

Speaker of the Senate Noel Kinsella, a Conservative Senator, rejected a Liberal motion of privilege with regard to the documented interference by the Prime Minister’s Office in Senate business.Photo: Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS/File

The government having left town, as it were, in a hail of bullets — one day before the post office announced it is ending home delivery — we are left to marvel at the prospect of a government, and a prime minister, who are quite literally hiding out from the public.

Not only was the House of Commons conveniently shuttered, but neither the minister responsible, Lisa Raitt, nor any Canada Post executives were on hand to answer questions regarding this drastic reduction in public services. But then, in this they were only following the example set by the prime minister, who has for months avoided answering questions about the scandal that is slowly destroying his government.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper waves as he boards the government aircraft as he departs South Africa Thursday December 12, 2013 in Lanseria, South Africa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

He does not answer the questions put to him in Parliament — simple questions of fact, on matters he would be in a position to know about, that one would think could be dispatched with a quick yes or no — when he chooses even to pretend to. He does not hold news conferences, in any but the most perfunctory sense. He does not consent to interviews, except under the tightest of conditions, and with the friendliest of interviewers.

He does not, because he dares not: because the story he has been telling — of a conspiracy among virtually everyone around him to dispose of a matter in which he had previously taken a great interest, in a way that he now insists he would have prevented had they not, all of them, lied and kept him in the dark — is not credible. It is indeed an open question whether he will consent to the sort of in-depth year-end interviews that prime ministers traditionally conduct. How can he?

If the Senate scandal has had such legs, then, it is because so much of the behaviour it describes, the secrecy and deception and control from the top, has been everywhere replicated in the government’s handling of the fallout. What began as a secret deal to buy a senator’s silence has progressed through several additional layers of deception: the bogus story about Senator Mike Duffy repaying his own bogus expenses, papered over with a bogus money trail; the tampering with the Deloitte audit; the whitewashing of the Senate committee report; the series of ever more preposterous stories, after the story broke, about what Senator Duffy and Nigel Wright were up to, and whether they were fine, upstanding public servants or misguided patriots or deceitful criminals; the denials of involvement or knowledge, including to the police, by several of the principals, in direct conflict with the known facts; the mysterious mass deletion of emails by Benjamin Perrin, who may or may not have been the prime minister’s lawyer, followed by their even more mysterious discovery; the stonewalling and evasions throughout. I may have missed a stage, but I believe we are now at the coverup of the coverup of the coverup.

But in the days before Parliament rose, as the government frantically attempted to close off every line of inquiry raised by the publication of an RCMP affidavit, what was previously denial and obfuscation reached the level of outright obstruction. Only, whether out of desperation or contempt or sheer cluelessness, they are no longer bothering even to conceal what they are up to.

I refer to the decision by the Tory-controlled Senate internal economy committee to refuse to call as witnesses any of those alleged to have taken part in the audit tampering. The committee — which, after all, had commissioned the audit in the first place — had earlier made a show of investigating the matter, hearing testimony from those responsible for conducting the audit that confirmed, at a minimum, there had indeed been highly improper inquiries made by a senior partner at the firm, Michael Runia.

According to the RCMP affidavit, it was Runia, the auditor of record for the Conservative party’s fundraising arm, whom Senator Irving Gerstein, its chairman, had approached to see if he could discover what the audit would report — one of several avenues that seem to have been pursued to block, influence or even shut down the audit. Yet when the motion was put to call Runia as a witness, the Tory majority voted it down — as, later, did the Tory majority in the Senate at large.

This astonishing performance was followed, in the days after, by the Senate Speaker’s rejection of a Liberal motion of privilege with regard to the documented interference by the Prime Minister’s Office in Senate business; by Senator Gerstein’s ruling, as chair of the Senate Finance committee, that a motion calling upon him to step down while the RCMP investigation continues was out of order; and by the apparent blocking of an opposition motion in the Commons Ethics committee to take up the matter of the disappearing emails.

As ever, we are confronted with the utter inability of our democratic institutions to hold those in power to account. Nor is this confined to the Senate mess. Debates in Parliament are now routinely cut short by “time allocation.” Committees now routinely meet in camera. The Parliamentary Budget Office is reduced to filing access to information requests for the departmental data to which it is statutorily entitled. The list goes on.

Ottawa is increasingly a town in lockdown — as often as not with all-party support. MPs of all parties have resisted having their expenses either audited or disclosed. All parties agreed to a plan to compel Hill staffers to sign lifetime gag orders (though the bad publicity may force a rethink), just as all parties colluded this spring to prevent Mark Warawa and other MPs from speaking their mind in Parliament. The culture of secrecy and control runs deep, and there seems no way to break out of it.

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile